In the following post we will rethink a concept commonly encountered and endorsed in the technology industry, technical debt.

Different yardstick

Let’s imagine that we need to paint the exterior of our house and we decide to hire a professional to do the job.

After consulting several quotes we decided to hire the services of “x” to take care of the job.

After a few days “x” tells us:

- The work is finished.

We stood at the front of the house and noticed that around the window frames it is unpainted in some cases.

Noticing this, we ask “x” why he did not paint around the window frames, to which he responds:

- Sorry, it is a technical debt that I can attack in the future.

How would you feel if you encountered such a situation?

Why in the context of technology do we endorse having technical debt?

Rethink

In technology it is very common to encounter this scenario and unfortunately we naturalize it and as I commented in a previous publication where I talk among other things about the importance of documenting and testing, it is something common that I always see as “technical debt”, rethinking the example of painting the house I think it exposes how we can have “different yardsticks” to measure the same situation in different contexts.

Why is technical debt harmful?

  • In test context: it is extremely difficult to make changes without exploding everything.
  • In context of documentation: it is extremely difficult to add functionality because the lack of documentation causes us to waste an enormous amount of time trying to understand how things are built.
  • In a team context: having technical debt means that the knowledge stays with the people and we should always, always encourage knowledge to be distributed.

Conclusions

The technical debt is very exhausting for the teams and where today we think we are gaining time, I assure you that soon, very soon, we will lose agility and speed in the development.

It can be avoided in most cases, and we do not accept it as a matter of course.

Finally, I hope that we will rethink together the “technical debt” and that we will be uncomfortable with it.

Thank you for reading! 👋🏽